Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Russians and Rossians

At WoE, Paul Goble has translated extracts from a recent interview with Eduard Popov, head of research at the Black Sea-Caspian Center of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, on the subject of Russian nationalism and its current move towards ethnic separatism. Today, Popov notes,

Moscow faces a rising tide of 'ethnic Russian separatism based on nationalist attitudes' precisely because the RSFSR of Soviet times has not become a Russian nation state.

To get away from this danger Popov believes that

the country must stop trying to use “the discredited definition” term for non-ethnic Russian (rossiyanin). “This term is an anachronism which was adopted by liberal ‘Yeltsins’ as an ideological mechanism for suppressing Russian ethnic identity.” Moreover, “there are no rossiyane; there is an [ethnic] Russian political nation.”